If you're running a FlatPress blog, keeping an eye on the main site and the forums lets you know about any potential problems with the software as well as available solutions.

That's especially the case right now as forum member pierovdfn has released a patch to one of the PHP files in FlatPress that eliminates a potential exploit in the authentication code.

FlatPress creator NowhereMan has already updated the FlatPress code and released it as 0.1010.1.

For existing FlatPress installations, applying the patch is as easy as swapping in 21 lines of PHP code. I did it this morning, and everything is working fine.

Blogsum is a written-from-scratch blogging application meant for use in the chroot web environment of OpenBSD. It uses an sqlite database and Perl on the back end. The developer uses it for his Obfuscurity. blog.

Thanks to Chess Griffin, in whose Twitter feed I learned of this project.

Like databases, blogging and a CMS with the word "geek" in it?

I present Geeklog.

How did I find out about it? It powers Groklaw.

I got a comment from BK (it could be Puppy lead developer Barry Kauler, or not …) about PPLOG, a flat-file blogging system that — like Bloxsom and Ode — consists of a single Perl script and very little else.

PPLOG comes out of the Puppy Linux community, and Puppy is a distribution that I’ve used quite a bit since I began messing around with Linux in late 2006/early 2007. I’m thinking of using it (again) on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt, which I recently upgraded from Debian Lenny to Squeeze. Squeeze is running great on it, but I think Puppy will allow me to squeeze (no pun intended) more performance out of this now-12-year-old laptop. The live CD will enable me to keep the disk entirely devoted to swap and storage, and Puppy is lean yet easy to configure — it’s not as bare as TinyCore.

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I’m on the lookout for more small blogging systems, and via Planet Debian and a post by Debian Developer Kai Wasserbäch, I just found Steve Kemp’s Chronicle.

You can see the system at work in Kai’s Chronicle blog and Steve’s Chronicle blog. Like many of these smaller (and larger) blogging systems, it’s packaged for Debian.

This is another one I’m going to look at.

I wondered why the official FlatPress blog shows the number of views per post, and mine did not.

The “xx views” at the end of every post is enabled by the PostViews plugin.

To enable the PostViews plugin, go to the Admin Area, click on plugins, then go down to PostViews and click enable.

The per-post counter starts when you enable the plugin.

I’ve been experimenting with other flat-file blogging systems, including Blosxom and Ode.

Both Blosxom and Ode are based on Perl scripts, while FlatPress is written in PHP.

Blosxom is pretty much dead, though there are many offshoots, including the Python clone PyBlosxom, the above-mentioned Ode and more, the list of which you can see at Blosxom’s Wikipedia page.

Ode has in its favor an excellent default design/theme, its mission of teaching the user Perl (since it was developed with the now-classic “Learning Perl” O’Reilly book in mind and includes two extensively annotated extra versions of the main Perl script), good documentation and an enthusiastic and inclusive lead developer in Rob Reed (Ode has its own Twitter feed as well).

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FlatPress has been working great, but I’m still exploring other blogging/CMS systems. I already have one WordPress install on my Hostgator shared-hosting account, and I used Hostgator’s automatic system to install another WordPress instance in a different domain.

That all went well, but what I really wanted was the ability to manage multiple blogs from a single WordPress instance. I made the first configuration change needed, but I couldn’t go further.

Why didn’t it work? I think that as part of the automatic installation of WordPress in Hostgator, it used the same database as my other WordPress instance, and due to that bit of database sharing, somehow I couldn’t get the “networked” blog feature to work.

The automatic installs, whether with Fantastico or Hostgator’s newer tool, are great because you click, click, click and have a service installed, but you then have no idea about how things were done unless you dig into the configuration files.

My database knowledge isn’t exactly broad, and I think the way to learn more is to create the database myself and install and configure the blog/CMS software the traditional way.

That’s what I like about FlatPress — besides not needing a database, you drop your files on the server via FTP, make a few changes, do some configuration (it’s not all text files; there’s a lot GUI in it) and you’re going. You can move it easily, back it up easily and look at the text files that hold your individual entries.

But I still want the multiblog, and I could do it with WordPress, Drupal, or even Movable Type, which I know very well. However, I don’t think that WordPress or Movable Type will allow me to do the one thing I really do want: the ability to write an entry and than target it to my choice blogs, moving it from one to the other (or running it in more than one) at will. That’s what I want.